Digital cameras have been widely used in a variety of applications. With the advent of some new applications, such as cellular phones and medical appliances, digital cameras are miniaturized to be adapted for easy mounting. Accordingly, camera module, a component of digital cameras, is required to have low manufacturing cost and small horizontal and vertical occupation areas for its suitability for many applications. Such camera modules may be manufactured on a single wafer by using wafer-level technology and packaging technology, and then the wafer-level camera modules are singulated into individual camera modules.
A conventional camera module is typically constituted of an image sensing component and a lens module disposed on the image sensing component. The lens module includes a lens which regulates incident light in order for the image sensing component to capture images efficiently. The lens module also includes a black material which encapsulates the lens to block unwanted light.
In the existing methods for fabricating the conventional lens modules, the black material is formed by a coating process which generally includes the following steps: 1) covering the top of a lens module, where a lens opening is defined, with an adhesive layer for temporarily blocking the lens opening; 2) curing the adhesive layer; 3) coating the black material; and 4) removing the adhesive layer covering the top of the lens module to expose the lens opening. Afterward, the lens module coated with the black material can be attached to a sensor substrate bearing integrated circuitry, forming a packaged lens module which can be subsequently built into a camera module after undergoing further processes.
These conventional methods of forming packaged lens modules include the steps of coating and removing the adhesive layer, thus increasing the complexity of the methods and may also bring risks of causing physical damages to the lens in the lens opening when removing the adhesive layer and/or causing imaging performance degradation of the camera modules being fabricated due to adhesive residues.